Today we are making available a maintenance update that includes many improvements to TeamQuest Performance Software. We routinely produce releases like this, providing significant updates, corrections and enhancements to our software. It’s just one way we deliver on our promise to provide value to customers.

This particular release includes over 80 improvements to the software that debuted with Release 10.3 late last year. 45 of the features contained in this release were specifically requested by our customers to help them in their day-to-day efforts to manage IT performance and capacity.

To see a summary of the release contents, check out our new release flyer. For details, customers can check the various product release notes in the Support area of the TeamQuest Web site. (Customer login required.)

The rush to virtualize everything NOW has been in vogue for a couple of years. But warning flags were raised at TTS by keynote speaker Leonid Grinshpan, a technical consultant with Oracle. He laid out graphically how much of a performance penalty there can be due to virtualization.

There are a lot of problems being experienced in the field with virtualization with enterprise applications, said Grinshpan.

Big companies like Thompson Reuters, for example, even have policy against virtualization their applications due to performance issues. On that company’s major application, Virtual Machines (VMs) impose an additional overhead which can reduce performance by 15 to 20 percent, and disk I/O sequential read performance can degrade by 15% – 70% depending on the architecture.

He modeled an example of three servers running two applications. When not virtualized, response time was always below the corporate standard of less than eight seconds and typically less than four seconds. Modeling with TeamQuest also highlighted that one server could be dropped and that performance would remain acceptable for both applications. When virtualized, however, the transaction rate soared for one app to more than 30 seconds. This, said Grinshpan, was due to VMs resulting in longer queuing times. He went into detail on queuing theory and showed specific numbers to back it up. All of this will be covered in a white paper that will be posted on the TeamQuest site within a few weeks. His message: VMs cause more CPU utilization and this has to be taken into account.

Use TeamQuest to model performance and provide the right estimates in a VM environment, he said.For enterprise applications, capacity planning will never be dead.

One way to address the sprawl of virtualization, said Rey Rios of TeamQuest, was to become far more agile by moving up the stages of the Capacity Management Maturity Model. He recommended the audience assess themselves against the model by visiting the TeamQuest site and completing a self assessment. That shows which level your organization is currently at and what needs to be done to move up to the next level.

According to Gartner, 60 percent of U.S. companies are at the reactive stage. To move upwards, said Rios, they need the combination of the right tools as well as the right processes and a lot of hard work.

It is not easy to jump from one level to another as it takes time and effort, said Rios. Do it sensibly in small steps. As you see the quick wins, everyone gets on board.

Ron Potter and Jon Hill from TeamQuest discussed another aspect of agility in a virtual world the implementation of the Capacity Management Information System (CMIS). It forms a single book of record for all capacity and performance related information for IT infrastructure components

If you build a CMIS, people and tools know where to go to get information, said Potter.

You might be thinking to yourself, “What in the world does Sea Mist have to do with IT?” Well, you are right…just a slight miscommunication. Instead of Sea Mist, Ron Potter and Jon Hill talked about CMIS (“s? miss” aka Capacity Management Information System). Enough with the play on words, how about some details?

TeamQuest products use shared components that manage all performance data and provide for centralized administration of performance data collection and management. Product integration through these shared components simplifies IT service performance analysis for large IT operations. The resulting efficiencies are viewed as a strategic business advantage by many TeamQuest customers.

Here are a few advantages of using TeamQuest CMIS:

1. Policy-based administration making it easy to manage a large number of systems.
2. Distributed storage of detailed performance data – you don’t have pull all of the data you collect to a central repository.
3. Seamless integration of federated data sources by using IT Resources in TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and IT Service Reporter in a single pane of glass.
4. Selective centralization of aggregated data to allow users be flexible in how they move data around. You don’t have to have it all or nothing, you can keep fine grained details close to the source while centralizing certain aggregated data.

The type and amount of data that you might include is truly unlimited by using TeamQuest User Agents and our XML interface.

Everyone can collect data, but it’s all about what you do with the data and how you transform data into information!

Rey Rios from TeamQuest gave a great presentation on Joining the Journey to IT Maturity. Rios has 15 years of IT industry experience with 10 years focused on supporting Performance and Capacity Management products.

IT Maturity matters the most when it is correlated to customer satisfaction. Each level of maturity gets you closer to achieving better customer satisfaction and thus adding value to your IT organization, your business your customers.

Focus on processes, but make sure the process is aligned with the business objectives and has a focus on the customer. IT processes are key to grow customer satisfaction, reduce errors, reduce costs, improve services and ultimately increase revenues.

Perceived Quality and Perceived Value. Customer Satisfaction is a only a perception. And it is only the customers perception, not the IT organizations perception. Value is a key differentiator to customer satisfaction. Value does not mean that services are cheaper, but how the service quality is relative to what they paid. This is important to know, because if this our driver to mature and improve services, then we must understand how to affect the perception of value. Value is also the ultimate desired result in the Maturity Model.

What’s the problem? Optimize performance of the current infrastructure, build capacity for new services–avoid overprovisioning (avoiding this saves money) Prevent incidents or improve the quality of service. Results: Wasteful, inefficient, unplanned, uncertain.

So, where do we start? Self Assessment (www.teamquest.com/maturity). And the other place to start is with core services first.

The total capacity of all guest virtual machines is lower than the total capacity of non-virtualized host server. Virtualization can be compared to cutting a whole pie into individual pieces. Two exceptions:

• It’s impossible to divide hardware components among virtual machines and they will always be shared.
• The pie slices altogether have the same number of calories as a whole pie, but the total capacity of all guest virtual machines is lower than the total capacity of non-virtualized host server.

Here’s a recap of an explanation on how the queuing theory results are in line with our experience:

1. Toll plaza with booths equally accessible by any cars has lower congestion than the same plaza with booths divided by two categories: ones serving only sedans and the others serving only trucks. An intuitive explanation is: in a non-divided plaza in an absence of the trucks a sedan can be processed by any booth and vice versa; in a divided plaza the booths dedicated to trucks will stay idle even if there is a queue of sedans.
2. Movie theater box office: if any window serves any theatergoers, then waiting queue is not as long as in a case when some windows provide only to particular customer categories.

If your company has joined the journey toward virtualization and cloud computing make sure it also has joined a journey toward system performance measurement and capacity planning to ensure smooth sailing.

It is important to have careful capacity plans in place when sizing virtual machines. You need to understand the differences between physical and virtual machines.

*This post was written by Drew Robb.

Day One of TeamQuest Technology Summit (TTS) kicked off today with two dominant themes; the changing role of capacity planning; and how the subject becomes more valuable than ever in today’s virtualization, cloud computing world. But that doesn’t mean capacity planning will necessarily grow in importance, according to Cameron Haight, an analyst at Gartner Inc. His presentation, “Capacity Planning is Dead: Long Live Capacity Planning,” covered a false perception in the business that the cloud does away with the need for the profession. He urged the audience to do a better job of communicating their value within the enterprise. He even suggested that a new name was required that better described that evolving role. Capacity planners, for instance, could be seen as being responsible for the health of the enterprise, as the people who validate cloud SLAs, compliance with corporate edicts, manage risk and verify the very viability of the cloud when all factors are taken into account. To emphasize the need for capacity management in the virtual world, he cited a recent survey of ESX Server utilization rates where they averaged less than 40 percent. That highlights an inability to model and plan accurately in those organizations that are heavily implementing virtualized infrastructures. The problem is that many in the industry are stuck in mainframe mindsets from 30 years ago. There is a need to evolve or the field may become less relevant. Part of this, said Haight, is dropping the prevalent MIPS-laden vocabulary and learning the language of the business. Scott Adams, director of Product Management at TeamQuest, followed up with an explanation of how TeamQuest is evolving with the times to provide greater functionality in terms of virtualized and cloud-based infrastructures. Up the line, he said, real-time automation of capacity and performance management was a long-term goal. Rich Rodgers, executive director of system integration, engineering and finance at Verizon Wireless, laid out how the company uses TeamQuest on a daily basis to drive down costs. He gave attendees an informative example concerning the company’s iPhone launch earlier this year, and how TeamQuest modeling assisted in the elimination of delays and bottlenecks. As it was a winter launch, the telecom giant offered customers a chance to pre-order online. This cut down on long lines at retail outlets. When it opened its online portal for those customers at 3 a.m. a few days before the official launch, it received more orders in two hours than in any single day in Verizon Wireless history. Good planning of IT resources made sure that there were no crashes or major flubs on launch day.

The movie and New York Times bestselling autobiography tells the story of Christopher Gardner, a father overcoming multiple obstacles on his road to success. Gardner is an avid motivational speak, addressing the keys to self-empowerment, beating odds, and breaking cycles. He is also a passionate philanthropist committed to many charitable organizations.

TTS attendees had the pleasure of listening the stories behind the story of Christopher Gardner’s struggles trying to raise his son by himself, being homeless, and trying to move up the corporate ladder at Dean Witter. Gardner’s talk definitely left the crowd feeling empowered and realizing that some of the obstacles that we face on a daily basis really aren’t that tough to overcome when you do everything in your power and never give up.

What an inspiration!

TeamQuest’s Jon Hill moderated a panel of TeamQuest experts tackling some of capacity management’s biggest issues from a vendor perspective.

Panelists:

1. Ron Potter, Best Practices Manager.
2. Per Bauer, Director of Field Support and Pre-Sales Operations – EMEA
3. Jeff Schultz, Director of Professional Services and Pre-Sales�Operations – Americas
4. Wyndham Sellers, VP of Software Development and Field Support
5. Scott Adams, Director of Product Management.

Here are a few notes and tidbits:

What is the biggest challenge in your job?

1. Setting priorities and trying to balance what is the right thing to do for the customer base at large.
2. Adapting products to fit customize customer needs.
3. Trying to unravel technology to relate to business drivers.
4. Differentiating TeamQuest and capacity management in the market place.
5. Trying to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape.

Most rewarding?

1. Seeing the product solving problems in real world scenarios.
2. Specifically tailoring a successful TeamQuest solution a unique environment.

The next discussion moved onto the importance of IT organizations to be agile and responsive. Question: isn’t it dumb to apply mature CM practices in virtualized environments? Isn’t reactive CM practices good enough?

1. Can’t always plan for every possible issue that may arise. There will be situations where you will have to react, but planning ahead is key.
2. Need to consider the level of risk to the business that is involved. The higher the risk, the more planning that should be entailed.
3. DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduling) is not mature enough at this point. The sophisticated processes underneath won’t allow for automated workload placement. Need to plan.
4. Must avoid cost. No one has an open checkbook. Risk=cost.

Business requirements are more agile than ever and this is creating the need for more agile, “quick and dirty” capacity planning. But this doesn’t eliminate the need to circle back and shore up the capacity plan as processes mature.

Two trends going on the same time that seem to be polar opposites. Hosting things on commodity hardware (virtual) and moving toward the highly specialized “stack.” It all comes down to what the business requirements are – IT needs to make the determination to what reduces cost and addresses the risks the best way possible. Need to be careful of vendor lock-in though.

Cloud computing – How does TeamQuest fit in with the cloud? Still have to measure and understand what is being used in the cloud. You need to have controls on the business side to manage risk and cost. You need to be an attentive and intelligent cloud consumer – the only way to do that is to measure it. Adding capacity still requires adding servers and someone still has to manage them – Public, private, or hybrid.

What’s the most valuable use of TeamQuest software? IT resource definitions and structures – helps align business process with IT process. Ability to predict workload demand and ability to meet service levels to ensure business success. Heterogeneous view of entire data center.

Stay tuned for more!

Monday afternoon began our breakout sessions. There are 3 breakout tracks: Cost Optimization, Service Optimization, and Solving Performance Problems. There was a lot of information with 9 sessions held in the afternoon. Here’s a recap for you:

Journey through User Agents

TeamQuest expert Vern Steidl and Verizon Wireless’s Tony Gibson informed attendees on how to get business and/or custom application data into the TeamQuest Capacity Management Information System (CMIS). The presentation focused on teaching the audience how to go about integrating various data sources and how TeamQuest User Agent technology is used for batch importing as well as for real-time performance data collection.

Does the IBM POWER Processor Technology Actually Improve Performance?

TeamQuest’s John Pokladnik discussed the results of various benchmark tests of the POWER5, POWER6, and POWER7 architectures with emphasis on the effects of threading. John compared the changes in response times and throughouts as activity levels increase. Important CPU counters to use for capacity planning and chargeback were also highlighted.

Heat Maps – The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

Highmark’s Terry Mishler walked the audience through how he has derived immense value from the heat map chart types in TeamQuest IT Service Reporter. Mishler explained to the audience what they are, how to set them up, and also how he has deployed them in different environments to help identify problems quickly.

Plan, Train, Deploy – TeamQuest Road to Success

Plan, Train, Deploy is TeamQuest’s new and improved process for providing software. This service is designed to streamline the deployment of significant new functionality, upgrades, or additional licenses to new or existing customers. Plan, Train, Deploy will help to ensure that customers experience a smooth implementation and begin getting value from their TeamQuest software as soon as possible after it is rolled out.

Solaris Zones Capacity Planning Using Headroom Reports

Walter Verhoeven from TeamQuest partner CREATIVE Associates provided information on how his company is able to enhance the functionality including advanced reporting, based on the ExRep Headroom Report set in TeamQuest IT Service Reporter. He detailed how to plan the capacity for your Oracle Solaris Zones environment.

Use of Modeling in Performance Engineering

Ankur Hajare of WellPoint provided an overview of the performance engineering process, and described how modeling can be used to achieve performance goals. Several examples and case studies were presented, all from the author’s long and varied experience in performance engineering and capacity planning.

Solving Enterprise Applications Performance Puzzles: Models to the Rescue

Oracle is a major vendor of enterprise applications supporting a range of critical business functions. Oracle’s Leonid Grinshpan introduced examples of queuing models for enterprise applications that visualize, demystify, explain, and solve essential performance analyst tasks, such as defining workloads, resolving bottlenecks, allocating resources in virtual environments, appropriately sizing the infrastructure, and using application models.

DAS (Desktop Application Service) – A Case Study

TeamQuest’s John Arnold showed examples where response time is measure from the point of view of a PC-based client running a web browser to interact with a web-based application. Arnold presented analysis of the networking and processing delays contributing to response time at various tiers that compromise the total application. The tiers include a PC running a browser, a web server, application servers and backend database. Armed with this information, a performance analyst can quickly determine where to investigate when response time fails to meet service level requirements.

With moderator, Cameron Haight, the panel addressed a variety of topics including cloud computing, virtualization, and the future of service delivery in tomorrow’s business environment.

Virtualization: goal is to virtualize 85% to 95% of their Windows environment using VMware. Starting virtual desktop projects that are currently in pilot right now. All are concerned with power and cooling.

Cloud Computing: starting to dabble with both public and private clouds. There are still security issues and concerns with public clouds for consumers.

How are virtualization and cloud computing changing capacity planning? Well, not an easy answer – it is and it isn’t. There are many moving parts, and they are moving quickly. Sometimes good enough capacity planning may be good enough and you may have to plan for a wider margin of error. It is much easier to create environments and then tear them down. The virtualization technologies ease some of the smaller capacity related incidents, but there still remains a need to plan for capacity.

What keeps you up at night? Reliability and uptime coupled with growth in business all the while having to do more with less. Realizing that you have to let go of some precision (not accuracy) – lead times are shorter so you have to give up some precision.

Traditional capacity planning groups need to insert themselves earlier in the application development planning process instead of waiting until the application is built. This theme all goes back to understanding the business needs and translating the business needs into the language of IT.